Callery's 'heart's still in Covington'

Ex-mayor Callery honored for years of service to the city

11:17 PM,
Nov. 11, 2013

View of the 300 block of East 33rd Street in Latonia, one of the neighborhoods that would have been demolished had a proposed coal barge facility been built in the late 1970s. Butch Callery's involvement helped a neighborhood group successfully stop the project and sparked his career in city politics.

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Thirty-five years ago, a Latonia resident's fear of public speaking led to Butch Callery rallying a crowd of hundreds, and a political career was born.

"When the co-chairman of the committee fighting the coal dock facility saw the crowd of about 300 people at Holy Cross, he said, 'Butch, I can't talk to all these people. You do it,'" Callery recalled.

In the months that followed that rally in the summer of '78, Callery employed a number of unorthodox methods to stop the coal dock planned for his residential neighborhood of Latonia. ...